The end of 2025 was the most successful in the history of the gaming service Steam — sales in the store and player spending reached record levels. Last holiday month, about 100 million players spent money on PC video games.
The end of 2025 was the most successful in the history of the gaming service Steam — sales in the store and player spending reached record levels. Last holiday month, about 100 million players spent money on PC video games.
According to Alinea Analytics, Steam earned $1.6 billion in revenue in December 2025, the highest figure in the platform’s history. This is 22,7% more than in December 2024, and even more than in December 2020, when $1.4 billion was earned due to the Covid pandemic and lockdown.
This was driven by Steam’s annual Winter Sale, which consistently ranks among the biggest spending events in PC gaming. Deep discounts, DLC bundles, and old game hits played a significant role, with several big games hitting their lowest prices ever.
One of the sales drivers was the online shooter ARC Raiders, which sold 1.2 million copies during the holidays alone. However, Counter-Strike 2 remained Steam’s top-grossing game thanks to spending on cosmetic items.
Valve, the company that owns Steam and created CS2, takes a cut of all skin transactions on the Steam marketplace, and since Counter-Strike 2 is the most popular game on the platform, the transaction volume is very high.
The record month also coincided with Steam reaching a new all-time high of 41.8 million concurrent players on January 4, 2026.
Previously, a Chinese gamer with the nickname Sonix became the first on Steam to receive a badge for 40,000 games in his game library. His collection is estimated to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars .
